Overview
Revenue Management is one of the most important areas for a company to ensure proper revenue assurance and efficient billing and collection processes. But when you look into individual functionalities, it becomes clear that Revenue Management is much more than that: it is also a significant contributor to improved customer experiences.
Upcoming technologies, changing customer requirements and new business models add a new layer of complexity to how companies charge and bill their services and what payment processes they work with. Such complexities often pose a challenge to older billing systems, and negative customer experiences related to billing mostly lead to losing customers sooner or later. Therefore, it is important for service providers to use systems that are capable of handling complex and innovative offers and bundles, billing customers in a timely and accurate manner, and delivering an invoice format that is transparent and understandable.
Why Etiya’s Revenue Management?
Etiya’s Revenue Management covers four main areas: Charging and Billing, Provisioning, Mediation, and Dunning and Payment.
The Charging and Billing System delivers convergent online and offline charging and revenue management functionalities for next generation products. It provides the ability to bill and charge complex bundles of traditional services, like voice and data, as well as various other value-added and digital services. With its centralized balance management and spending control capabilities, it allows different cross-product discounting methods across multiple markets, for prepaid and postpaid products as well. The product also supports equipment charging and tracking of sales commitments, and handles various innovative promotion types (eg. recurring, community, cross-promo discounts, custom-designed bucket functionalities, etc.). It provides a real-time, convergent charging and billing experience based on industry-conformant product models, with carrier-grade performance and operational excellence.
The Mediation System acts as a central mediation platform and supports communication with various network elements and business support systems, providing extensive multi-vendor compatibility via its suite of interface adaptors. Supporting a broad range of data formats and transfer protocols, it also helps to reduce time to service integration, while minimizing operating expenses. It is highly adaptable and scalable, allowing for rapid implementation of new business requirements, as networks evolve over time and new nodes are added.
The Network Provisioning System is a highly configurable Workflow Manager and Provisioning Solution. It supports synchronous provisioning and full rollback mechanism when the request cannot be successfully completed in any one of the nodes. With this feature, the initiating system ensures that all provisioning is completed in all required nodes, and if an error occurs in one of the provisioning nodes, then a clean rollback on all nodes can be done, with no inconsistency between any of the nodes.
The Dunning and Payment Solution helps speed up the collection process by taking the right actions for the right customers. It calculates the dunning cycle based on custom attributes, such as subscriber’s segment, credit class, open amount, and the number of unpaid invoices. Dunning path definitions and corresponding action mappings for each segment are fully configurable. It supports automated processes, where actions are performed in real-time, based on rules defined by the operator. Predefined templates help configure customer notifications messages. This solution also supports automated customer care and provisioning operations (such as barring), and it is able to integrate into legal collection and credit scoring systems easily.
Flexible bundles and billing - more personalized offers - better monetization
Etiya’s Revenue Management supports a wide range of products, from voice, text and fixed or mobile data, to activity-based video services, event and content-based services, to be configured and billed as a single product or a more complex bundle.
With a flexible charging and billing system, with innovative promotional and discount options, bucket configurations and commitment trackings, CSPs will be able to launch and bill innovative new services and product packages quicker to meet customer demand, exploit new market potential, and generate extra revenue.
Besides being innovative, flexible and personalized in their offerings, service providers must be able to bill their services on a timely and accurate manner, and deliver an invoice format that is transparent and understandable. Therefore, flexible, timely billing with consistent and real-time pricing from all channels, and ability to charge all services on a single invoice, in an easy-to-understand way are the top priorities for all operators. On one hand, it will allow a company to maximize revenue opportunities from monetizing new technologies and services, while on the other hand, it will also help meet customer expectations and ultimately leading to overall improved customer satisfaction.
Transparent billing will keep customers happy
Services might be complex, but the invoices should never be. Customers need clarity and transparency on what their invoice contains. It needs to be easy-to-understand, and has to provide a clear explanation on all the bundles, monthly fees and usage charges, so that your customers can feel they are in control, and they can monitor and manage their spendings better. And that ultimately will lead to increased customer satisfaction, trust and loyalty.
Compliance with authorities’ requirements
We understand that certain customizations might be needed in the billing process or in reporting, in order to meet the requirements of various local regulatory bodies around the world, (eg.: taxation and finance), and we can also cater for that. We want to make sure, that those authorities will also be among your happy customers.
And the technical part?
We know that easy implementation and system integration is always key. We offer a flexible, highly scalable solution, that allows easy integration.
Revenue Management can be integrated with other products in the Etiya product portfolio, like Product Catalog, CRM or Order Management, but can also be implemented stand-alone and integrated with the customer’s existing products. It follows industry standards by 3GPP and TM Forum, assuring long-term product life. The components are developed in compliance with eTOM, SID and TAM frameworks.
Etiya offers consultation services throughout the customization and the implementation process, to find the solution that is most suitable to our partner’s needs.
